


This Time Around

by Inrainbowz



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Gen, Naruto Sci-Fi Week 2019, POV Umino Iruka, does it make any sense, i'm not sure, one of those sf dystopia were life sucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:55:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21545635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inrainbowz/pseuds/Inrainbowz
Summary: Three runaways wash up at Iruka's door, and he won't give up on them this time.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto, Hatake Kakashi & Uchiha Obito & Umino Iruka
Comments: 20
Kudos: 168
Collections: Naruto Sci-fi Week 2019





	This Time Around

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Naruto Sci-Fi Week day 7, "Dystopian". A sort of sequel to [this thing I made ](https://inrainprose.tumblr.com/post/189211458974/inraindrawz-i-found-them-really-how-do)for day 3. I sort of have a bit of a continuation to this but I'm lazy lol. One day maybe.

As soon as the clock announced the end of his shift, Iruka bolted from where he was half sleeping on the counter and started to prepare the shop for closing. He didn’t want to stay any longer than necessary, but the old man didn’t like it when Iruka packed up before the right time, and despite never putting a foot in the shop, he always knew, somehow, when Iruka was slacking. The young man had looked for hidden cameras or any kind of surveillance system several times, to no avail – he just had to accept that the old rascal was prescient.

If he could, Iruka would say bye-bye to the creepy shop and find another job, any job really. He couldn’t. He had no skill and no education, like everyone working in these streets, and he was well aware that keeping a “library” of dirty literature and films was far from the worse fate that could befall on the people from the lower levels of the city. Even if all its clients were awful people.

There was a commotion in the street, the telltale sounds of a police raid – the sirens, the metallic injunctions of the peacekeeping robots and their wheels bumping on the bad road. What were they after this time? Escaped slaves, arms dealers, activists? It was routine at this point.

Iruka went to the back of the tiny shop to take out the trash – another day of picking up soiled tissues from the shelves because those people couldn’t wait to be back home to consume what they bought or borrowed here. He pushed the door open, called for the light to be switched on.

Three pairs of eyes rose to meet his.

Not three, actually. Two. One of the kids had a bandage wrapped around his head – blood was seeping from underneath like tears. As for the other two… a boy and a girl, looking both frightened and defiant, ready for a fight. Iruka stood dumbstruck, not knowing how to react.

A loud knock on the front door made them all jump.

“Police, police,” said the automated voice. “Open up, police!”

It was the matter of a second. Of connections happening lightning fast in his brain, a decision made even before he could think about it. He put an index on his lips to mimic silence and closed the door, locking it up, before making his way back to the front of the shop.

“I’m coming!” he called when the peacekeeper’s knock became stronger, almost breaking the glass.

Iruka did his best not to look too skittish under the dead glare of the robot’s face, the round camera lens serving as its eye staring him down. He was always ill at ease in their presence, even when he had done nothing to warrant their scrutiny.

“Fugitives are hiding in this district. If you have information on their whereabouts, you are obligated by the law of the state to share them with the police.”

The robot held up three wanted notices, sporting three kids looking away from the camera, the pictures taken unbeknownst to them.

Three kids who were huddled in his backroom right now.

“I have no information about it, sorry,” Iruka answered, proud of his steady voice and confidence.

“We will search these premises,” the robot declared.

“Of course.”

It didn’t need to enter the shop – their eye could, among other things, detect infrared, body heat, life signs… it just had to sweep its head around for it to pierce through walls and detect their prey.

Iruka held his breathe, praying to the gods he hadn’t worship in years that the old man wasn’t having him on when he had explained one day, drunk out of his mind, that they used to held clandestine meetings in this shop and that as such, they had set up ways to combat the police omniscience.

“Nothing,” the peacekeeper said.

Iruka fought hard against a relieved sigh. The robot held out one of its arms. Iruka presented his wrist, the one sporting his identification chip.

“Thank you-thank for your cooperation,” the voice drawled with a little jolt. It was an old model that had seen better days, but its apparent deliquescence didn’t mean it couldn’t still break a human body in half. With a sweep of the chip, it deposited thirty fren into Iruka’s account – the police always rewarded good behavior.

“I only did my duty,” Iruka said blankly. The peacekeeper finally turned away to regroup with its colleagues, six or seven of them interrogating everyone in the street. It was a lot for just three wandering kids. What could they have possibly done? He hadn’t dare look at the notices too closely.

Maybe he had just covered for serial killers or something.

Iruka let out a bitter laugh. It was highly unlikely. Serial killers didn’t have it so bad around here. It was far riskier to be a student or a musician.

He went back to the backroom. The kids hadn’t moved an inch, tensed and alert, ready to bolt.

“They left,” Iruka said gently, not wanting to scare them even further. They looked battered and exhausted, clothes dirty, blood drying on their skin.

Iruka had never rebelled, never. He had pulled some stunts as a teenager, like everyone did until a police beating or a trip to the Reformatory put a definitive end to it. He had never disobeyed, never gone against the state laws. Not even for…

That’s what did it in the end. He thought he was done with those regrets, but he obviously wasn’t, if those kids could remind him of his childhood friends when they had nothing in common whatsoever. Apart from being runways.

And having their fate in Iruka’s hands.

“I live above the shop. We can go up without having to step outside.”

The girl was hugging the blindfolded one tightly, as if she could protect him by hiding him in her embrace. The other boy, blonde hair and blues eyes betraying his origins and the reality of his conditions, had an arm around them both and was debating with himself, the decision seemingly resting on his shoulders. He glanced at his two friends, considering – he and the girl exchanged a long, loaded look, before he turned back to Iruka, and gave the smallest nod.

It was absurd, how relieved he felt.

The old man lived on the first floor. Drugged up days in and days out, he rarely came out of his room, and wouldn’t have noticed if a peacekeeper ripped a hole through his wall, let alone that there were four sets of footsteps passing his door on their way to the second floor.

It was only one room – a mattress in a corner, a pipe in another that served as a shower, piles of clothes lying around and, height of luxury, a tiny food replicator one of Iruka’s friends had saved from the garbage dump and managed to tweak back to life.

“I can give you some clothes. You can have a wash too, and I have some supplies to tend to your wounds. Do you want something to eat?”

It was obviously too much for the three kids who stared at him dumbly, unable to comprehend the mercy that was being shown to them. Iruka sighed.

“I’ll leave you to it, alright?” he said, and went to tidy the room a bit like nothing was amiss, like he wasn’t committing a crime that could send him to jail, or worse. He ignored them as best as he could, until they were comfortable enough to move around too.

He couldn’t help but observe them out of the corner of his eyes.

They couldn’t be older than twelve. They had propped their friend against a wall, the one that couldn’t see. He seemed mostly out of it, if his stillness was anything to go back. The blonde boy turned around, exposing the nape of his neck and confirming what Iruka had inferred – there, just below his hairline, he had been branded an immigrant by the unforgiving hand of the Citizenship Regulation Office. A spiral – a refugee from Uzushio then. Konoha had accepted to take them in, but certainly not to give them the same rights as its own citizens. Just being here, in this district, instead of in their ghetto was enough for him to have the police on his tail.

He spoke to the girl in a low voice, very slowly and with short, simple sentences, as if she was a child. It took a moment for Iruka to understand why, to recognize the numbers tattooed under her eye, the unusual shape of her face and eyes.

She was a factory worker.

It also explained the crystal embedded at the center of her forehead. He had never seen one in real life before, and he had no idea they could be used on humans. They were supposed to enhance brain activity and had been imagined, at first, to make intelligent pets out of the few animals left in the country.

That’s probably why she could talk at all. Factory workers were modified to have the strength of ten men, but the brainpower of none. They could only understand the most basic orders. Iruka’s suspicions were confirmed when she effortlessly lifted the third boy to bring him to the shower pipe as if he weighed no more than a com pad.

So, an immigrant and a slave, two second-class citizens. What of the third one then?

No matter how he insisted, they refused to take the mattress and instead huddled together on a pile of blankets he unearthed from the old man’s things. They shared some fruits and biscuits between them, and he wondered what they had been eating until now to look so happy about such a simple meal. At least they looked in better shape than just a few hours ago, when they fell asleep on top of each other. Iruka wanted to stay awake, if only to keep an eye on them, and because it didn’t seem that reasonable to go to bed with three fugitives just a few meters away, but the day had been long and eventful, and he lost that battle embarrassingly fast.

.

At first, the screams mixed with the strange dreams he was having, of the police chasing after him and others as they tried to scatter across the dirty streets, but as hard as he ran, still they got closer and closer, still they were going to catch him.

He battled against slumber for a moment before realizing the screams were very real.

“Let me see, Sasuke, let me see!”

The blindfold was on the floor and the boy was digging the heel of his palms into his eyes, howling in pain. The blonde boy had a death grip around his wrists, trying to move the hands away, to no avail. The girl could only rub her friend’s back, trying to soothe him, looking terrified and lost.

“It’s going to be fine,” she kept saying, “it’s going to be fine, the doctor will fix it for you, it’s going to be fine.”

They had completely forgotten about Iruka, who honestly debated just turning away and going back to sleep. He couldn’t do anything for them. But the boy’s scream wouldn’t let him rest.

Iruka approached the trio just as the blonde finally managed to pry the hands away, the screams subsiding even though there were still tears of blood pouring out of the boy’s eyes.

And oh, what eyes.

Iruka didn’t think he would ever get to see those again.

He let out a soft gasp of surprise and the blonde spun around, alerted to his presence, his witnessing. With impressive speed, he jumped to his feet. The next moment, he had a blade pressed under Iruka’s neck.

Iruka couldn’t even blame him. A refugee, an escaped slave, that was bad enough. But this? This was on a whole other level.

Somehow it hadn’t even crossed his mind when he had seen the bandages on the boy’s eyes, because there wasn’t supposed to be any of them left. The eye implants had been outlawed only a short few years ago, but the repression and hunting of those who had once prided themselves of it had been brutal and immediate. Powerful families, well established in the government and the industry, wiped out between one season and the next after rumors of a coup marked them as enemies to the state leaders’ paranoia.

The last time he had seen these eyes, red and black and said to grant many powers to its users, it was staring at him with both disbelief and resignation, as its owners realized that Iruka wasn’t such a good friend after all.

Why had Obito gifted the eye to Kakashi? It was the mark of his entry into their family, but rumors also had it that the boy simply couldn’t bear having two of them. It required a level of mental fortitude not everyone could aspire to. It was either splitting between the two of them or Obito being stripped of the privilege entirely, cast out of his clan.

It would have done him good, after all.

Iruka already worked in the shop back then, his life had already reached this dead end. He had heard about the purges only hours before Kakashi had knocked on the backdoor with a badly wounded Obito, begging for help.

Just like today, the police had knocked on the front door. But Iruka hadn’t lied then.

He was barely fifteen and he was terrified out of his mind. If he was caught lying to the police, they would take him to the Reformatory, and there was no way, no way he would ever go back there…

His friends had come to him looking for help, and he had turned them in instead.

Everyone wanted to believe they would rebel, if ever the occasion arose, that they would hide illegal immigrants refugees and protect runaways, but the truth was they were all equal in front of their terror of the state laws and its police. He had hated himself, had regretted it every day since, the images of Kakashi and Obito disappearing in a police car replaying endlessly in his mind. It wasn’t hard to piece together what had happened to them.

He had promised himself that if he got to do it again, he would do it right this time. It was the only reason why he had lied earlier, why he had brought the kids up to his room.

And it turned out that the third one was of Obito’s family, that they were running from the same threat. It felt like fate.

“I have some eye drops left somewhere. You ran through teargas, right? It will ease his pain.”

The implants were more sensitive than regular eyes. And the teargas was designed specifically with that in mind.

The blonde didn’t move. The blade dug deeper into the soft skin of Iruka’s throat, not quite breaking it yet, but it was a close thing.

The girl rose then. She put a hand on the blonde’s outstretched arm.

“Some are nice still, Naruto. Like the doctor and the old ramen man, and sensei too. Some are nice still.”

She pressed down slightly. She had the strength to bring him to his knees, but her touch stayed light, until he complied, dropped his arm willingly. Satisfied, she looked up at Iruka with her big, childish eyes.

“Help?”

He had kept the eye drops, even if his friends were long gone and he wouldn’t ever need them again. He smiled at the girl, and she smiled back, satisfied.

Fate indeed.

[Art that goes with this](https://inrainprose.tumblr.com/post/189211458974/inraindrawz-i-found-them-really-how-do)

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry if this doesn't make much sense. I like science fiction. See you!


End file.
